COVENTRY UNIVERSITY

Coventry University is a modern, forward-looking university whose roots can be traced back to 1843 to the Coventry College of Design. With both a proud tradition as a provider of high quality education and a focus on Research Excellence with Impact, the University has established an academic presence regionally, nationally and across the world.

Through its links with leading-edge businesses and organisations in a variety of industries, Coventry University’s 24,000+ students enjoy access to placement opportunities which ensure that their employability prospects are enhanced by the time they graduate. Its students also benefit from state-of-the-art equipment and facilities in all academic disciplines from health, sport science and performing arts to industrial design, engineering and computing.

The institution has earned a strong reputation for enterprise and innovation, which sees it work with more SMEs each year than any other University and helped it to secure the Times Higher Education “Entrepreneurial University of the Year” award in 2011, the status as “Modern University of the Year” in 2014 and 2015, and ‘University of the Year for Student Experience 2015’.

In recent years Coventry has seen a dramatic improvement in its positions in every major university league table and student satisfaction levels have risen significantly to cement the institution’s position as one of the leading modern universities in the country. The University consistently scores well in the teaching quality category, with over 92% of students surveyed in 2013 agreeing that tutors and lecturers are “enthusiastic about what they are teaching” and are “good at explaining things”.

The University is recognised internationally for its expertise in serious games and disaster management and for the world-leading calibre of its engineering and design graduates, particularly in the automotive field.

It was chosen to host three national Centres of Excellence in Teaching and Learning, which has enabled it to invest substantial sums of money to improve still further the quality of education in health, design and mathematics. The city centre campus itself is continually developing and evolving and a recent £100 million-plus investment in a new student centre and engineering and computing building is playing a key role in modernising the entire learning experience.

ROLE IN THE PROJECT

Coventry University has embraced the potential of digital technologies to enhance users' experience of CH. Digital Media offer the potential to challenge the “democratic deficit” that may exist between the producers/curators (museums, archives, heritage and planning professionals) and consumers/users of cultural heritage and to explore ways of breaking down distinctions between the “making” and “using” of heritage. They have interest in the mapping of cultural networks, in heritage landscapes both physical and conceptual and in the social changes which inform them, in the management of archival content and in the application of digital technologies to heritage, education and tourism contexts.

CONTACTS

​Project Coordinator: Neil Forbes (Professor of International History at Coventry University, Coventry’s Director of Research), n.forbes@coventry.ac.uk

​Sarah Whatley (BA PhD Professor of Dance and Director of the Centre for Dance Research "C-DaRE" at Coventry Univ.), s.whatley@coventry.ac.uk

​Martin Woolley (MDesRCA PhD; Associate Dean of CSAD, “Coventry School of Art and Design”, FRSA FDRS MA in Furniture Design at the Royal College of Art in London; Fellow of the Design Research Society and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts), aa7968@coventry.ac.uk